


Open-plan offices are favoured by companies largely because of economic factors – more employees can be housed in a smaller space. But there are also supposed communication benefits. The idea is that open spaces foster more communication between staff and boost community spirit. A new study based on a survey of over 42,000 US office workers in 303 office buildings finds no evidence to support this supposition whatever.

Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear analysed the workers’ answers to the industry standard “Post-occupancy Evaluation” that asks them to rate their satisfaction with seven aspects of their office environment including: temperature, lighting, privacy and ease of interaction, plus it asks about their overall satisfaction with their personal workspace. Two thirds of the surveyed workers were based in open-plan offices (with or without partial partitions); a quarter had private offices; and a small fraction shared a single room with co-workers.


The most powerful individual factor, in terms of its association with workers’ overall satisfaction levels, was “amount of space”. Other factors varied in their association with overall satisfaction depending on the different office layouts. Noise was more strongly associated with overall satisfaction for open-plan office workers whereas light and ease of interaction were more strongly associated with overall satisfaction for workers in private offices.


“Our results categorically contradict the industry-accepted wisdom that open-plan layout enhances communication between colleagues and improves occupants’ overall work environmental satisfaction,” the researchers concluded. They added: “… considering previous researchers’ finding that satisfaction with workspace environment is closely related to perceived productivity, job satisfaction and organisational outcomes, the open-plan proponents’ argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature.”



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22 thoughts on “The supposed benefits of open-plan offices do not outweigh the costs”






  3. What a misleading title! As a business psychologist, I was expecting something … else. Psychologists have understood this for some time. But as @a6ruled pointed out, there's such a thing as management. Not to mention, lower walls between cubicles are cheaper. Stirring the pot may bump up the number of readers, but it's not so effective for credibility.




  5. I'm not sure if it's sad or funny that people think open-plan offices are given to employees with the the idea “that open spaces foster more communication between staff”.

    When Robert Propst was working at Herman Miller in the 1960's to create the Action Office, predecessor to modern “open plan offices”, his research found that open environments actually reduced employee communication. Bosses liked it specifically because they wanted employees to work, not talk.

    Now we've come full circle, and companies are trying to sell open-plan offices using the exact opposite of their previous justification — and one which is not backed up by any research.

    It should be clear by now that people trying to push open-plan offices don't care about communication, one way or the other. They have made up their minds that they want an open floorplan, and they're inventing justifications for it. Today the “spontaneous employee communication” is in fashion, so that is the justification we're given, even though there's no reason to believe that it helps this.





    Also, I would like to disagree with the reply above that balance is required in an open space… the stress of being visibly “not working” easily removes any purported relaxing effect of such spaces, which makes them useless at anything other than looking vaguely trendy.



  8. Pretty obvious businesses will gravitate towards the most economic solution. I know some people genuinely like open plan, I guess it's subjective but one way or another, the fact of the matter is that you don't see any managers in open plan which makes me wonder – if its not good enough for them then don't waste our time trying to persuade us of the benefits




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